


But the Water is Still There

by CameraLux (TinCanTelephone)



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Brother-Sister Relationships, Canon Compliant, Character Death, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Heavy Angst, Minor Character Death, POV Katara (Avatar), Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:40:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26015905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinCanTelephone/pseuds/CameraLux
Summary: It begins with an innocent question from Lin, and Sokka carving a betrothal necklace.Over the years, Katara watches the story of Sokka and Toph and Lin and Suyin, trying not to feel caught between them.
Relationships: Katara & Sokka (Avatar), Suyin Beifong & Sokka, Toph Beifong & Katara, Toph Beifong/Sokka
Comments: 72
Kudos: 250





	1. Lin, Katara, and Sokka

**Author's Note:**

> In which I cram every headcanon I've ever had about Suyin's parentage into one angst-filled tokka fic XD (Srsly, I almost cried multiple times while writing this) 
> 
> As usual, [this lovely piece of art](https://lovelyrugbee.tumblr.com/post/99090263718/all-she-wanted-was-to-hear-his-voice-to-tell-him) by @lovelyrugbee was incredibly inspirational <3
> 
> And a HUGE thanks to CloverCreative/[@sineaden](https://sineaden.tumblr.com/) for catching all my typos and assuring me everyone seems in-character! Couldn't've done it without you, girl! <33

“Auntie ‘Tara?”

“Yes, Lin?” Katara says, swirling her hand around the pot of soup on the stove. “Dinner’s not quite ready yet.”

“No, I have a question.” Lin pulls out a kitchen chair and climbs on, short legs swinging in the air. 

“What is it?” 

“Is Uncle Sokka my daddy?”

Katara’s hand freezes over the pot, and she thanks the Spirits Lin can’t see the expression on her face. After schooling her features and turning down the heat on the stove, she slowly turns around to look her adoptive niece in the eyes. 

“What makes you say that, Linny?” she says, not sure what she’s hoping to hear.

“Well,” Lin taps her fingers on her chin, a solemn expression on her pale face. “I told Tenzin I saw Mommy and Uncle Sokka kissing, and he says that means Uncle Sokka’s my daddy.” 

“You saw what, Honey?” Katara says faintly, not sure whether to find Tenzin and give him a good talking-to, or find Sokka and strangle him with a water whip. 

“Mommy and Uncle Sokka,” Lin lowers her voice, “ _kissing_.” She makes kissy noises with her mouth. “On the _lips_.” 

“And when… when was this?” Katara takes a seat next to Lin and leans forward. 

“Well the first time–”

_First time!_

“–was in the kitchen when Uncle Sokka was cooking dinner. I was supposed to be practicing bending in the backyard but came inside to go potty and I saw them.” Lin giggles. “They didn’t notice me. I even surprised _Mommy_.” 

“And… and the second time?” Katara’s almost afraid to ask.

“Well the second time was in Mommy’s bedroom–”

_Oh, no._

“–and I was supposed to be asleep, but I was thirsty so I went to ask Mommy for a cup of water, except the door was locked so I unlocked it with metalbending and that’s when I saw it again, except they were lying down this time.”

Lin pauses, but Katara can only stare back at her, hoping the abject horror she’s feeling isn’t so obvious on her face. Her _brother_ … and _Toph_ … how long has this been going on? Why haven’t either of them said anything? What are they thinking?

“But they kiss lots of other times, too.” Lin shrugs. “Like when Mommy’s sad, or when Uncle Sokka goes to work before breakfast, or when we all have a tea party in the backyard.” She folds her hands on her lap and looks up at Katara, as if proud to have made her case. “So, is Uncle Sokka my daddy?”

Katara blinks. She almost forgot the original question. She shakes her head. “No, Honey. Just because your Mommy and Uncle Sokka… _kiss_ sometimes does not mean he’s your daddy.”

“Why not?” Lin says. “You kiss Uncle Aang, and he’s Tenzin’s daddy.” 

“Well– yes, but–” _Damn you, Toph!_ Spirits, she’s going to murder both of them when she gets the chance. “That still doesn’t mean Uncle Sokka’s your daddy.”

“Why not?”

“Because– well, your Mommy kissed lots of other boys before Uncle Sokka and one of those is your daddy.” _So there_. Katara stands up and goes back to the soup on the stove, hoping the conversation is over. Toph can deal with the inevitable follow-up questions.

“Oh,” Lin says, in such a sullen tone that Katara turns around again. “I kind of wish Uncle Sokka was my daddy.” 

_Shit_. Katara abandons the soup and kneels by Lin’s chair, reaching out to stroke her hair. “Well, even though he’s not, Uncle Sokka loves you like a real daddy, and he’ll always be there when you need him, okay?”

“Okay…” Lin doesn’t raise her chin. “Auntie ‘Tara, does my real daddy love me?”

Katara hesitates. “I… I don’t know, Linny.” Honestly, she’s not sure if Kanto even knows about Lin. She puts a gentle hand on Lin’s cheek. “But it doesn’t matter, because you have your Mommy, and Uncle Sokka, Uncle Aang, and me. And always remember that _we_ love you, okay?” 

“Okay.”

Katara gives her a hug, then smiles and helps her off the chair. “Now run and tell everyone else that dinner’s ready, alright?” 

“Alright.” Lin seems to brighten at the prospect of dinner and runs off to find her friends.

Katara glances down at the water. Didn’t Toph say Sokka would be the one picking Lin up tonight? 

Katara’s waiting for him on the dock when he arrives. 

“Hey, Sis,” he calls, drawing in the sails and lashing his little boat to the dock. “I’ve come to get the little hell-raiser.”

_Little hell-raiser, indeed._ She waits until he’s stepped onto the wooden planks to smack him in the face with a water whip. 

“ _Ow!_ ” He staggers backwards, one hand on his face. “What the hell was that for?”

“ _That’s_ for sleeping with Toph!”

“What?”

“You heard me.” She doesn’t have the patience for his denial. 

“Where did you hear that?” he demands. 

“From Lin!” Katara throws up her hands. “Apparently you meatheads have been _kissing_ in front of her, and now she wants to know if you’re her dad!”

Sokka has the grace to look embarrassed, but before he can respond she continues, “And apparently she’s also walked in on you two _having sex_ –”

“Okay, that’s not true–”

She raises her water whip again.

“Well, it’s an exaggeration!” He raises his hands in defense. “We weren’t in the middle of–” he cringes, “we were just… warming up.”

“Eugh, I don’t want to know!” Katara drops the water and crosses her arms. “Either way, I can’t decide what’s worse– confusing that poor child with your crazy relationship, or the fact that I had to hear about it from her!” 

Sokka wilts. “Alright, alright, I’m sorry. That’s not how you should’ve learned about it.” 

“How long has this been going on?”

He shuffles his feet. “I don’t know… a while…”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, we’ve been… on and off a lot over the years, I guess.”

“ _Years?_ ” 

He straightens. “Look, it was just going to be a casual thing– I’ve been helping her out a lot with Lin and it just sort of… happened. And then it kept happening, and now here we are.” 

Katara narrows her eyes. “How does that _just happen_?” 

“What do you want me to say? We’ve always been close friends, we’ve just gotten… closer.” He smirks and waggles his eyebrows. 

“Ew, you’re so gross.” She makes a face and almost turns away to walk back to the house, until it occurs to her that Sokka loves to gross her out when he wants to deflect. “Okay, just– tell me one thing, Sokka. Does she make you happy?”

He hesitates, the smirk fading as he realizes she’s serious. “Yeah,” he says after a minute, bowing his head to hide the sincere emotion on his face. “She does.”

“Okay, then.” She gives him a short nod, and starts walking back to the house. 

“Really? That’s it?” He follows her, jogging to catch up. 

“Yeah.” She smacks his arm, gently this time. “You and Toph need to have a talk with Lin, and I still wish you’d just _tell_ me these things, but if you’re both happy, of course I support it.”

“Thanks, Katara,” he says softly, and she smiles and lets him walk ahead of her so Lin sees him first as she comes charging out of the house, schoolbag already packed and thrown over her shoulder.

“Uncle Sokka!” she yells, and without missing a beat he scoops her up and holds her against his hip like he’s done it a thousand times. Which, Katara supposes, maybe he has. 

“Hey there, Kiddo,” he says. “You ready to go home?”

“Yeah!” She throws her arms around his shoulders, and he gives her a hug before walking back towards his boat. 

Katara watches them go, looking so natural with one another it feels right that _home_ should mean the same place for both of them. 

* * *

Katara never sleeps well under a full moon. But it isn’t an unpleasant sort of wakefulness, the kind she tries to resist with calming teas or meditation. Every month, the full moon fills her with an electric sort of energy that makes sleep seem unnecessary, and even if Aang notices her dragging during the day it never seems possible to rest at night. 

For different reasons, Sokka doesn’t sleep well under the full moon either, so it never surprises Katara to find themselves awake together– although that happens far less frequently now that they live apart. 

But tonight, Sokka’s staying on Air Temple Island for reasons she honestly can’t remember, or if he even disclosed them to her. Equipped with his own sailboat, he tends to come and go as he pleases, arriving unannounced with some flippant, half-sarcastic reason behind the visit, then staying for random, unpredictable lengths of time. 

When it first started happening, years ago at this point, he liked to say it was to make sure Bumi was doing alright. But Katara suspects the real reason had more to do with loneliness brought on by so many days alone in his apartment with nothing but work to occupy his mind. Over the past year or so, the visits have dropped off in frequency and duration, and thanks to Lin, Katara’s pretty sure of the reason for that, too. 

But he’s here tonight, and Katara almost doesn’t notice him tucking something away as she wanders into the kitchen, except Sokka always gets the same shifty-eyed look when he’s hiding something. 

“What was that?” she says, staring hard at the ribbon that still escapes his breast pocket. 

“Nothing.”

Spirits, he’s still a terrible liar. She narrows her eyes. “That had better not be what I think it is.” 

He glares. “Like it’s any of your business.” 

She crosses her arms. “Sokka–”

“Fine.” He pulls at the ribbon and tosses the necklace onto the table. 

Despite herself, Katara’s breath catches. Sometimes, when drunk or tired or otherwise maudlin, he’s talked about this in vague, theoretical terms, and she always allowed herself to hope it would remain that way, nothing he’d actually act on. But now it seems so much more real– the stone a smooth, polished meteorite he would’ve had to get from Piandao’s castle, intricately carved with a symbol not quite Earth Kingdom and not quite Water Tribe. 

“I know what you’re going to say,” he mutters.

“And what’s that?”

“That it’s a bad idea, and I shouldn’t do it.”

She sits down carefully across from him. “I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Then what _were_ you going to say?”

“Just that…” She looks closely at him. “Are you sure about this?”

“What do you mean?” He folds his arms and looks away, and Katara’s sure if they weren’t in the house he’d be lobbing his boomerang into the distance just for something to throw. 

“Well–”

“It’s been over a year,” he says. “We don’t sleep with anyone else, we basically live together, we share everything, I cook dinner for her, I love Lin, I love–” he swallows, “I love her.” 

Katara swallows and looks down at her hands, remembering long nights many years ago listening to Toph rant and rail against the very idea of marriage the first time Kanto so much as mentioned it. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.” 

Sokka huffs a painful-sounding laugh. “Then what am I supposed to do?”

“Just… be satisfied with what she’s willing to give,” she says, although it sounds lame to her own ears. 

He reaches out and grips the necklace again. “I just don’t see how it makes a difference,” he murmurs. “Nothing else would change.” 

“It makes a difference to her.” 

He drops the stone again, staring out the window. “It makes me think she doesn’t feel the same way about me. Us.”

“Sokka, you know that’s not true.”

“Do I?” He turns to look at her. 

“ _Yes_.” If Katara’s sure of anything, it’s how Toph feels about Sokka. “But you have to understand– not everyone sees marriage the same way you do.” 

“…It’s not fair.” He blinks, and for a second, she almost sees tears in his eyes. 

At once, all the fight leaves her and she sits back in her chair. “No,” she says. “It isn’t.”

She sees the necklace again four weeks later, when Sokka stands at the edge of a cliff on Air Temple Island and hurls it into the ocean. She watches it sail in a smooth arc to land in the water with a soft _plunk_ , creating ripples in the reflection of the moon. 

She doesn’t hesitate to bend the water back, catching the dripping necklace in her hands and drawing the water away. 

Sokka doesn’t try to stop her, but doesn’t reach to take it back before slumping onto the nearest rock and holding his head in his hands. “Why did you do that?”

“Because you’d regret it.” 

“I’m pretty sure I won’t.”

“You will.”

She expects him to keep arguing with her– say something sarcastic or contrary to hide what he’s really feeling, but instead he just lets out a long, defeated sigh. Katara muses that it’s probably the closest he’ll ever get to admitting she’s right. 

“You know,” he finally says, “I think that fucking fortune teller was right.”

“What?”

“That my life would be full of self-inflicted struggle and anguish. And that it was written all over my face.” 

Katara stares. “I can’t believe you remember that.” 

“It’s kind of hard to forget.” Sokka picks up a rock and tosses it into the water. 

“Well, it’s not true.” She reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Because this isn’t your fault.”

He shrugs it off and steps away. “Then whose fault is it?”

“ _No one’s_ ,” she says. “It’s just the way things are.”

“The way things are is stupid,” he says sullenly.

“Will you… will you still be together?” she asks, her voice soft as she holds the stone up to the moonlight. It’s beautiful– and it breaks her heart to see how much time he must’ve spent on it, and how he must’ve felt when Toph turned him down. 

“I don’t know.” He walks a few feet away and sits on a low wall facing out to sea, his feet dangling in the air. “She said she wants to, and I don’t want to tell her no, but… I don’t know if I can.” He takes an unsteady breath. “I don’t want to hurt her, but I just don’t know if I can.”

Tentatively, careful not to get too close, Katara sits down next to him, tilting her face into the breeze blowing off Yue Bay. 

“You were right,” he says. “I shouldn’t’ve asked.” 

“No, no I wasn’t.” She reaches out for him, then lets her arm drop. “I’m sorry about what I said that night. You had to be honest about how you felt.”

“But I hate how I feel now,” Sokka says. “I hate it. It hurts to be away from her, and to think that it’s over. But now it also hurts to go back.” 

“So don’t,” she says, folding her fingers around the stone. “Go away for a little while. Visit Dad, or Iroh. Just so you can have some space.” _And someone who’ll be able to give better advice than me_. Not that her relationship is perfect by any stretch, but Katara feels woefully unprepared to help her brother through this. 

It’s hard enough to be unbiased. She loves them both so much, but seeing her brother this upset makes her want to march over to Toph’s place and give her a piece of her mind for hurting him. It would be wrong, and Toph would never forgive her, but she still wants to do it. 

“Go see Dad,” she says again. “I bet he’d love that, we haven’t seen him since he was ill last winter.”

Sokka sighs, coming out of his hunched position and leaning back on his hands. “I guess it would be good to see how he’s doing…”

“Yes,” Katara says, placing a hand on top of his. “You can stay with us until you can book a passage. A little time away will be good for you, I promise.”

He raises his eyebrows. “If I didn’t know any better I’d think you were trying to get rid of me.” 

She reddens and has to look down, but decides to tell him the truth. “Only because I don’t know what to say, Sokka. I can’t really understand what you’re going through, only that I hate to see you like this, and I know that traveling a bit, and seeing Dad, would be a good distraction for you, if nothing else. And might even make you feel better, at least for a little while.” 

She isn’t quite sure what she expects him to do, but yelps in surprise when he pulls her into a tight, one-armed hug, almost squeezing all the breath out of her.

“Okay,” he says, “I’ll go. Maybe you’re right.” 

She smiles into his shoulder. “I’m going to remember you said that tonight. Twice.”

He squeezes her tight again, making her gasp. “And you’ll take it to the grave.”

She chuckles and squeezes him back. “Just promise to come back, okay? I still need you here.”

He relaxes his grip and rubs her arm up and down, pressing a kiss to her temple. “I promise.”

* * *

Katara doesn’t see Toph for several weeks after that, which is expected. By then, Sokka’s long gone, spending an indefinite amount of time at the South Pole with their dad. Lin’s visits to the island have dropped to almost nil, which Tenzin won’t let Katara hear the end of, and even then facilitated by Toph’s lieutenant and the Air Acolytes. But this time, Toph brings Lin herself, on a ferry, and marches the girl up from the docks with a grim look on her face. 

Tenzin quite literally blows past Katara at the front door to pull Lin off to play, and she lets them go, expecting Toph to turn around and leave without much more ceremony. But instead she walks right up to her, head hung low and shoulders hunched. 

“Hey, Sugar Queen.”

“Toph.” Katara crosses her arms, not about to give in that easily.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“Don’t make me spell it out. I’m not in the mood.” 

Katara’s about to tell Toph just what she thinks of her _mood_ when Toph blows her bangs out of her face and she notices how pale she looks, and how her cheeks are strangely hollow. She relents and lets Toph step inside. “Fine. What do you need?”

“I need medicine.”

“Alright.” Katara leads her to her medicine cabinets. “What for?”

“A stomach virus,” she says. “I’ve had it for a couple weeks now.”

“Weeks?” Katara turns around and looks at her friend more closely. It’s hard to tell under her uniform, but maybe more than just her face is thinner. Her eyes narrow. “You don’t look feverish. Has Lin had any symptoms?”

“No. What’s with the interrogation?”

“A couple weeks is too long to have a stomach bug, Toph. You should let me examine you.”

“I don’t need to be examined, I need some herbs or whatever to make me stop puking.”

“I can’t help you if I don’t know what I’m treating,” Katara says, although she has a pretty good guess.

“ _Fine_ ,” Toph growls, brushing past Katara to her examination room and sitting heavily on the table. “Just make it quick.”

“This won’t take a minute.” She makes Toph remove her armor and bends a layer of water to her hand from one of the bowls lining the walls. She knows exactly what to look for, and barely has to touch Toph’s chi paths to have her answer. “Toph, when did you last bleed?”

“I don’t know!” she snaps. “A couple months ago, maybe. Who cares? I’m getting older, isn’t that supposed to stop eventually?”

Katara rolls her eyes and flicks the water back into the bowl. “Toph, I still bleed every month. You’re not that old.”

“I’m old enough.”

“No, you’re not. Toph, you’re pregnant.”

Toph groans and presses her hands to her face. “I can’t be pregnant. Lin’s almost six!”

“You know that has nothing to do with it.”

“I’m still too old to be pregnant!”

“Not according to your uterus.”

“Ew, gross.”

“Oh, grow up.” Katara walks back to her medicine cabinets and begins pulling out herbs to help with nausea. “How’re you feeling? It looks like you’ve lost weight, so the morning sickness must be pretty bad.”

“More like all-day sickness,” Toph grumbles. “Haven’t kept anything down besides broth and crackers.”

“These should help with that,” Katara says, collecting the herbs in packets for her to take home. “Let me know if they don’t work. You shouldn’t lose anymore than you already have.”

Toph mumbles something that might’ve been an assent and shoves the medicine in her pockets. 

Katara pulls out a few more and puts some water on to make her first dose. “Frankly, I’m surprised you couldn’t tell yourself. You’re over eight weeks along, you were able to feel Lin’s heartbeat at this point.”

“I can,” Toph admits, her voice a defeated whisper. “I just didn’t want it to be true.”

Katara licks her lips. “Toph… you know I can also give you something to… take care of it, if that’s what you want.”

“No.” Toph’s shaking her head before she finishes speaking. “I’m going to keep it.” 

Katara narrows her eyes and finally asks. “It’s Sokka’s, isn’t it.”

“No it’s not.”

Katara sighs. “I can do the math, Toph. Unless you’ve been cheating on him, which would be a stupid thing to admit to me when you’re surrounded by water.”

“Okay, fine!” She sniffs, and Katara realizes with a start that she’s crying. “Of course it’s his.”

Despite herself, Katara feels her heart soften at the sight of Toph’s tears, and gathers her into a hug that, to her surprise, she returns. “Let’s go to the living room, okay. Take the medicine, and I’ll make us some tea.”

Fifteen minutes later, they’re both settled in the living room with cups of tea and biscuits. Katara keeps an eye on the kids through the window into the courtyard, just in case any of them decide to come inside, but the weather is beautiful and the sun sets late this time of year, so they seem perfectly happy where they are. Bumi isn’t around, probably off galavanting somewhere with his United Forces buddies, so Kya, Lin, and Tenzin are bending with abandon, holding mock battles and pro-bending matches across the fountain. For a moment, Katara allows herself to imagine another child running around after them. An earthbender, if Toph’s blood is any indication, or maybe (she almost chuckles to herself), a waterbender. 

“Where did he go?” Toph says quietly.

“The South Pole.”

“When will he come back?”

“I don’t know.” 

“He… he _will_ come back, right?” she says, and Katara can’t help but relish the fear in Toph’s voice, just a little bit. 

She takes a long sip of her tea. “Yes, he will.”

“Good.” Toph’s lips press into a hard line and she doesn’t speak for a long time, staring sightlessly at her tea, her expression carefully flat. 

Katara taps her foot impatiently, waiting for her to elaborate, but she doesn’t. Some of her anger is returning, and she remembers she never got a proper apology at the door. “You broke his heart when you said no, do you know that?”

Toph’s mask cracks, but just a little bit. “Well, he broke mine first.”

“Oh, so now you’re even?” 

“Yes.”

Katara rolls her eyes. “I hope you’re happy, Toph.”

“I am!” 

“Come on, don’t be stupid.” She shakes her head, setting her tea aside. 

“I’m not being stupid.” She crosses her arms and blows her bangs from her face. Petulant, like she’s still twelve years old.

Katara swallows her irritation and tries a different approach. “Look– you’re miserable, he’s miserable… I just don’t understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Well, you love him, right?” 

The directness seems to work, and Toph’s posture relaxes a little. Her arms drop to her sides, and she bows her head. “Of course.” 

“And he loves you–” she ignores Toph’s incredulous expression, that’s a battle for another day– “and now you’re pregnant with his child. I just don’t understand why you said no.”

Toph gives a barely noticeable flinch, but covers it with a sigh and pulls the cord out of her hair, letting it fall like a curtain around her face. “I never meant to hurt him, I promise.”

“I know,” she says softly, encouraging.

“But I just… I’ve told you how I felt about marriage before, and all that stuff’s still true. Even though it’s Sokka, I just can’t do it.”

Katara should’ve known, but it still stings to hear. “Did you explain it to him, at least?”

Toph nods. “Yes, I tried,” she bites her lip, “but I’m not sure how well I did… I was flustered and– emotional, and you know I’m bad with words–”

“I know,” Katara interrupts, conceding that perhaps Toph has been punished enough. “I know you never wanted to hurt him.”

“ _Never_.” Toph shakes her head, and has to put down her teacup before it spills. 

Heart aching, Katara moves forward to embrace her, but one thing still stops her. “Toph?”

“Yeah?”

“I promise I’ll never ask you this again but just– as his sister… will you ever reconsider?”

“No.” Toph doesn’t hesitate, but her voice cracks and she starts crying in earnest. 

Katara’s heart breaks at the sight, and pushes down the last of her frustration to pull Toph into her arms.

“It’s too late,” she says. “I’ve ruined it. Again.” She presses a hand to her belly. “I’ve ruined this baby’s chance at a family before it’s even born.”

“No, Toph. No,” Katara says, rubbing her back as she sobs into her shoulder. “I promise you, it’ll be alright. Everything will be alright.” And she tries to believe it, she really does. Because they’re family, and everything has to work out in the end.

But she’s glad Toph’s feet are curled up on the couch, so she can’t read her heartbeat. 

As promised, Katara sends a hawk to Toph with a message scratched on a thin sheet of metal as soon as Sokka’s boat docks in the harbor. Even after all these years, he never takes airships when he can help it. But he must go back to his apartment in the city first, because Toph arrives at Air Temple Island hours before him, Lin in tow and packed for a sleepover with Tenzin and Kya. 

“What do you mean he’s not here yet?” she says, angrily pacing the kitchen as Katara washes the dishes from dinner.

“What do you want me to say?” she snaps. “I don’t control where he goes and when. All I said is that he’d be arriving in Republic City today. If you want to go by his place yourself, be my guest.”

“You know I can’t do that.” 

Katara snorts. “ _Can’t_ or _won’t_.” 

“Both!” Toph is almost shouting, but lowers her voice when Lin, outside in the courtyard, turns her head towards the window. “What if he doesn’t show up at all?”

“I never guaranteed that he would,” Katara says, although privately, she thinks she might kill him if he doesn’t. Even if he doesn’t exactly owe it to Toph, he definitely owes something to _her_ , to let her know how he’s doing. 

Toph growls, but then seems to collect herself, pushing her bangs out of her face. “I’m going for a walk.” 

“Sounds like a good idea.” Katara turns her attention back to the dishes as Toph stalks out of the house, probably to the cliffs on the eastern side of the island, where she can take out her aggression on fallen rocks and chuck them into the water without disturbing the ferry lanes. Katara stays on the north side of the island, keeping one eye on the kids and one eye on the channel for a little sailboat. 

It grows dark and Toph doesn’t return. The last ferry comes and goes, and Katara puts the kids to bed, smiling tightly and distracting Lin with a bedtime story when she asks after her mother. Then she retreats to the kitchen to brew a third pot of tea. It’s late, but she’s not tired, her body humming with anxious energy and the full moon struggling to penetrate the clouds. She sits alone in her and Aang’s bedroom, looking at the hazy shadow of silver outside and holding the betrothal necklace in her hands.

She swallows hard, the stone of her own necklace bobbing against her throat. She still doesn’t understand. Toph loves Sokka, she’s sure of it, just as much as she loves Aang. Why on earth couldn’t she say _yes_?

It’s too dark now to spot a sailboat, but she still hears Sokka before she sees him, his slightly uneven footsteps drifting through the window as he jogs up the stairs from the dock. 

She hurries down to meet him, shoving the necklace in her pocket as she goes. In the kitchen, she pours two cups of tea as he shrugs off his outer layer and pulls his hair loose from its wolf tail. 

“How was the trip?” she says.

“Fine. Weather was good.”

“That’s good.” She sits down across from him, curling her fingers around her cup. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“Me, too.” He sips his tea and leans forward on his elbows, looking tired. 

The necklace is heavy in her pocket, the words are on the tip of her tongue. Toph is still somewhere on the island. Katara forces them down. “How were things at the South Pole?”

“Okay. I got to see Dad and do some chief-ing.” He takes a sip of tea, wincing when it burns his tongue. 

“That’s good. I’m glad he’s showing you the ropes.” She can’t do this anymore. “Listen, Sokka–”

“Actually, it was mostly Malina.”

“What?” Katara sits back, confused.

“Yeah.” Sokka runs a calloused hand through his hair, stopping near the end and holding it in his fist. “Dad, uh, he wasn’t feeling up to much so it was mostly Malina. Showing me the ropes.”

Katara’s stomach feels hollow. “He… but I thought he was doing better! He said so, in his letters.”

“Yeah, well he must’ve… exaggerated or something.” His hand falls back to the table with a _thud_. “I don’t know. Apparently he’s never been quite the same since last winter.”

“Is it… how long…?” This can’t be happening. Her kids aren’t old enough, they haven’t had enough time…

“No, no, don’t think like that.” He reaches across the table to grab her hand, which she hadn’t noticed was shaking. “Nothing like that.” He tries to smile for her, but his eyes are serious. “But… we did talk about it– his retirement. Me taking over the tribe.” The smile fades, and he glances over her shoulder, across the water to the winking city lights. “Maybe I won’t run for re-election, and just move back permanently as soon as my term is up next year.”

_But Toph…_ “No you can’t do that!” She takes her hand back, agitated. “You can’t leave… me. And Aang. And the kids.” _Your kid_. “Not yet.”

He frowns. “Well… maybe not immediately, but eventually it’ll be unavoidable. At the very least, I’ll definitely have to visit more often, and for longer.”

Katara huffs an impatient sigh and presses her hands together, suddenly uninterested in tea. She can’t talk about this with him, not until he knows what she does. Even then, she can’t talk about their father…

“Sorry.” Sokka takes another sip of tea and shakes his head. “I think I interrupted you earlier. Were you going to say something?”

“Toph’s here,” she says, wincing at the guilt curling in her chest. He probably doesn’t want to deal with that right now, but it’s too late. “On the island. Somewhere. And I think you should talk to her.”

He pauses, tea halfway to his lips, then sets it back down. “Why?”

_Why is she here, or why do I think you two should talk?_ Katara chooses the easier question. “I don’t know. She just… said she really wanted to talk.”

He raises a hard, sarcastic eyebrow. “I don’t get one night to myself after a four-fucking-day ferry ride?”

She bites her lip, blinking away tears. “You came here, didn’t you?”

“That’s not the same.” 

She knows it isn’t. 

He crosses his arms. “You were the one who told me to get away for a while. You know, for some _space_.”

She becomes aware of the necklace again, hard against her leg. “Just talk to her, okay?”

She’s a terrible liar, even by omission, and Sokka isn’t stupid. He knows she knows something, she can tell by the way his face sharpens when he looks at her, searching. She drops her gaze and hopes he doesn’t press her.

“Fine.” He stands up, chair scraping loudly over the stone floor. 

“I think she’s on the beach. To the east.”

“Thanks.” 

“Wait,” she says when he’s almost out the door, her hand halfway to her pocket. Would it be too much to hope?

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” She brings her hands back to the table. “Never mind.”

Katara’s been called a lot of names in her life, many of them by Toph, most of them accurate. _Busybody_ is one of the nicer ones, on one of the many occasions she pried into Toph’s relationship with Kanto. 

_“You have no right!”_ she’d shouted. _“This is my relationship, I can do what I want in it!”_

And perhaps she had a point back then– but this is different, Katara assures herself as she steals across the island after Sokka, careful that he doesn’t hear. This time the relationship is with her _brother_ , and Toph can’t just do whatever she wants to her brother. 

Katara stops when Sokka descends the stairs to the shore where Toph’s still chucking rocks into the water. 

_She really shouldn’t be exerting herself_ , the healer in her thinks as she settles down behind the low wall overlooking the beach, perfectly silent. The only reason she can get away with this is the sand below her– Toph’s seismic sense won’t carry very far, but she still has to be quiet. 

The boulders stop flying. “Hey, Sokka.” 

“Toph.” 

“Welcome back.”

“Thanks.” 

Katara risks a glance over the wall. The clouds have gone, and the moon casts a bright silver streak across the water, and faint shadows on Sokka and Toph, facing each other, standing six feet apart.

“How’s Lin?” Sokka says. 

“Fine.” Toph tilts her face towards the light, in a way that makes Katara wonder if she can actually tell it’s there. “She got a bad grade on some writing assignment. I couldn’t help her with it.” 

“I’m sorry.” Sokka sounds genuinely sad, and it makes Katara’s heart ache to think that he’d make such a wonderful father, if only Toph would let him. 

“How was the South Pole?”

“It was… it was good. Mostly.”

“Mostly, Snoozles?”

It almost makes Katara smile, how Toph knows all his tells. 

“Yeah.” Sokka reaches up to rub the back of his neck. “It was good to see my dad. He’s… he’s getting up there.”

“That’s good. That you got to see him, I mean.”

He huffs a laugh at her awkwardness, and the air around them seems to relax a little bit. “Toph, you know how he was really sick last year?”

Toph looks sharply back towards him. “Yes.”

“Well, when I was down there I realized… it’s taken him a while to completely shake it, and it made me think about a lot of things.” 

She looks away again. “What kind of things?”

“Like… that I’m going to have to leave Republic City at some point. Permanently. Whether that’s a year from now or ten years from now. I have to take over as chief from him. I owe it to my tribe.”

Toph’s already shaking her head. “Sokka…”

He steps forward. “And I know you could never come with me–”

“Sokka–”

He takes another step, reaching out. “Just let me say that… even with everything that happened between us, I never wanted to leave you, Toph.” 

“You can’t.” Toph’s crying now, Katara can tell from the way her palms brush her face, but she can also feel the water, even from this far away, under the light of the moon she can feel how hard their hearts are beating.

“I don’t have a choice.” Sokka sounds torn, hurt, and Katara wants to yell at Toph that she has no right to say that to him, not really. She broke his heart and he’s the only one who’s apologized. 

“You can’t,” Toph says again, her breath hitching as she steps forward. 

Sokka steps away. “Toph, you have to understand. I have a duty to my family, to my people.”

“ _I’m_ your family, Sokka!”

He rubs his forehead. “You know what I mean–”

“I’m pregnant.”

He freezes and looks at her, eyes skimming up and down her body for signs he knows aren’t there yet. “What?”

“I said I’m–”

“Fuck, I heard you.” He paces down the beach, away from her. “I can’t do this right now, Toph.”

She crosses her arms. “Well, it’s already fucking done.”

He scoffs, turning away, towards the water. “Are you going to get rid of it?”

“Of course not, Sokka, I could never– I love you!”

The admission startles Katara. She has no idea if Toph has ever said those words to Sokka before. 

If Sokka’s just as surprised, he doesn’t show it. After a moment’s silence, he rounds on her and says, “Well, you’ve got a funny way of showing it!”

_There it is_. Katara’s hand closes around the necklace. Sokka hates getting angry with people he cares about. Even with Suki, Katara never remembers him raising his voice, preferring to talk through conflicts calmly and rationally. But in her opinion, if anything deserves his temper, this does. Her fingers curl more tightly over the meteorite. 

“Please don’t bring it back to that,” Toph says, desperate, pleading. 

“Bring it back to what?” His sarcasm is biting. “The fact that I _proposed to you_ and you threw it back in my face?”

“I didn’t _throw_ –”

“You may as well have!” He’s still pacing away from her, until he’s almost at the stairs that lead up the cliff, and Katara tenses, preparing to scramble away. 

She knows she shouldn’t be listening to this, shouldn’t be watching, but she can’t leave now. Then he turns and walks back towards Toph, as if drawn by an invisible cord that tightens when he gets too far away. 

He walks right up to her, so they’re closer than they’ve been this whole time, close enough that they could touch if either of them reached out. “Toph, I love you, too.”

Katara can feel the blood pumping in his veins, and she thinks bitterly that Sokka’s heart never did know when to quit. 

“And you love me.” He takes her hand. “I just don’t know what makes this so hard.”

Katara thinks Toph’s going to pull away, but she doesn’t, just shakes her head and looks at the sand beneath their feet. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, so softly Katara can barely hear. “I’m so sorry.”

“Can you at least tell me why?” he says. 

“I already did,” she says. “Marriage to me–”

“No, not that,” he says. “ _Really_ tell me why.”

Now Toph pulls her hands away, and to Katara’s surprise she walks towards the waterline, so her toes sink into the sand and the waves lick gently over her bare feet. Like she’s trying to numb herself. 

“Because I always knew you’d leave me.” The wind carries her words up to Katara, as if it knows how desperate she is to know as well. “Whether it was to the South Pole, or for someone else, someone better–”

“Toph, please,” Sokka reaches out to catch her wrist, “What’ll make you believe that there is no one better than you? You’re _it_ , for me. There will never be someone else.”

She pulls away again, but turns halfway towards him, hands coming up to her face. “But you’re still going to leave.”

He bows his head in shame, hands falling limp at his sides. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“What are we going to do?” Toph says through her tears. “I’m going to have your baby, and this is so messed up.”

Sokka’s quiet for a long time, thinking. “I’m going to run for another term on the council.”

She looks up. 

“I want to be here for you and Lin, and for our son or daughter, for as long as I possibly can,” he says. 

Toph laughs a little at this, sadly. “You make it sound as though you’re dying.”

“Sorry.” He takes her hand again, and she lets him tug her back away from the water. “I’m so sorry, Toph. For all of this.” 

“Me too.” She draws him closer, reaching up to touch his face. 

“I want to be a father for our child,” Sokka says. “A real one.”

“You’re already a real father,” Toph says, before her hand drops to his shoulder. “But… I don’t think I can let the baby call you that.”

_What?_ Katara stiffens where she’s slumped against the wall, wrapped up in the scene unfolding before her. What new Toph craziness is this?

“Why?” Sokka says, although his hands stay wrapped around her. 

“It’ll be a scandal– all over the papers,” she says, “if someone hears them call you ‘Dad’ in public. We’re not married, we’re not even together as far as most of the city knows. The opposition would have a field day.”

Katara can almost hear Sokka rolling his eyes. “That’s such a stupid reason.”

Toph barrels on, “Also, Lin knows you’re not her biological father, and I don’t want her to feel like she’s less than, because the baby will have both her parents but she’ll only have one.”

He’s shaking his head before she finishes. “I can be a parent to Lin, you know I can. She can call me ‘Dad’ too, if she wants.”

“No, she can’t,” Toph says, hand sliding down to grip his arm. “Sokka, your father left you. I know it was just temporary but you know what that’s like. I don’t want my children to have a father that leaves them.”

Katara’s heart sinks as she starts to understand what Toph is saying. Besides her mother’s death, her father leaving them was one of the worst times in Katara’s life. She’d felt so abandoned, so _lost_ , without him, and her anger over that choice is something she occasionally feels to this day. 

She knows that Sokka can feel it, too. 

“You can’t stop me from being there while I can, Toph, for all of you.” His voice is cracking. “And it won’t matter what they call me.”

“Then you’ll let them call you Uncle Sokka,” Toph says, gripping both his shoulders. “You’ll let me try to protect them, just in this one small way.” 

Sokka clearly doesn’t want to concede, Katara knows he disagrees with all of Toph’s reasons with every fiber of his being, but she watches him nod, and draw her gently into his arms. He whispers something in her ear that Katara doesn’t catch, but she knows he’s giving in. 

She wants to interrupt them– to run down and tell Toph she can’t take this away from him, but she doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t move. Because a part of her understands, and maybe even thinks Toph is right. 

But it still isn’t _fair_ , and when Toph draws her head back to pull Sokka into a long kiss, she looks away and pulls the betrothal necklace out of her pocket again, running her fingernail along the grooves. She’d imagined that Sokka would probably want it back, even if Toph wouldn’t accept it. But now she’s not so sure. 

It feels strange, and a little wrong, to be in possession of something so central to their relationship. Just like it was wrong of her to listen in on them tonight. Heaving a silent groan, Katara picks herself up from the ground next to the wall and walks silently back to the house. 

On the way back, she passes the cliff where Sokka first threw it into the water, and considers doing the same. But she barely stops before deciding against it, black stone swinging from her fingers wrapped around the dark green ribbon. It’s a beautiful necklace, and Sokka put so much care and thought into it. 

She’ll hold onto it. Just in case. 

* * *

Her father is dead. Katara is an orphan. The thought almost makes her chuckle to herself– can one call oneself an orphan at almost fifty years old? Then she remembers the funeral has just ended, and she’s supposed to be sad. 

And she _is_ sad, but like it was when her mother died, or Gran Gran, or Iroh, the grief comes in waves, sometimes washing over her and holding her down like a weight on her neck she can’t lift, then ebbing away like the tide and leaving her feeling lighter than air in comparison. Aang is with her, which helps, and all her children are here– Bumi is back from United Forces training, Kya from her wandering journey of waterbending and self-discovery, and Tenzin, who still lives on Air Temple Island but has spent most of the journey south on the arm of Lin. 

Suyin is still the baby– not quite nine years old, and attends the funeral with the rest of the Beifongs dressed by her “uncle” (Katara still cringes internally at the term) in solemn water tribe mourning clothes. She sits quietly next to her mother during the ceremony, but Katara notices her getting antsy during the reception afterwards on the ground floor of Hakoda and Malina’s home. She can sympathize– it’s mostly a ‘grown-up’ party, where everyone’s talking about a man she doesn’t remember. 

Katara watches her tag along after Lin and Tenzin for a while, before she’s shooed away and finds Sokka, sitting across from her at a table near the fire. 

“Hey, Kiddo,” Sokka says, reaching down to scoop her up, but she pushes his arms away.

“I told you I’m too old for that anymore.”

“You did,” he says. “I’m sorry.” He looks back down at the drink in his hands, and as the firelight casts harsh shadows on the lines in his face and grey streaks in his hair, Katara thinks he looks too old for that, too. 

Suyin climbs into the third chair at the table and rests her sharp chin in her hands. “Uncle Sokka, I’m bored.”

“Sorry, Little Badgermole,” he says, reaching out to ruffle her hair. 

“Lin told me to _go away_ ,” she says, lower lip poking out. “It’s not fair. She only wants to hang out with Tenzin anymore.”

“I know it isn’t.” 

_He looks so tired_ , Katara thinks. His eyes are red and his shoulders are bent, but she can tell he’s really trying not to let Suyin see. Trying to make this memory with her a good one, as much as that’s possible, because he’s not sure when he’ll see her again. 

“Why doesn’t she ever want me around anymore?” she asks, glaring over to where Lin and Tenzin are huddled in a corner, whispering to each other. 

Sokka glances at Katara, a grin playing at the edge of his lips. “Well, she’s your sister, Su. Sometimes sisters just want to be alone for awhile. I can’t tell you how many times your Auntie Katara wanted a break from me.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Sokka says. “But the great thing about Lin is that no matter what she’ll always be your sister, and families always stick together in the end.”

Suyin turns to look at her, and Katara smiles, although this talk of _siblings_ and _family_ is making her want to cry again. If Toph were listening, and if she had her seismic sense, she’d call out Sokka for being a liar and a hypocrite– talking about families sticking together when he’s about to leave all of them to stay at the South Pole. In her weaker moments, Katara wants to do the same, not just for Lin and Suyin but for herself. The thought of returning to Air Temple Island and looking across the bay to a city without Sokka makes her feel hollow inside. 

Suyin heaves a dramatic sigh and turns back to Sokka. “Mom says you’re going to stay here instead of coming back with us.”

“That’s right.” Sokka leans back in his chair, and hides his expression by taking a long sip of his drink. 

“Why?”

“You know how my dad was chief of this tribe?” 

“Yeah.”

“Well, now it’s my turn to be chief,” he says. 

“But why does it have to be you?” Suyin says. “Why can’t someone else do it?”

Sokka falters, and looks at Katara as if for an answer, but she just looks back, one eyebrow raised. _Yeah, Sokka. Why not someone else?_

He sighs and takes her hand. “Su, the South Pole– this tribe– is my home, before Republic City was my home, and now that–” there’s a slight catch in his breath, “–my father is gone, someone has to lead it, and protect it, so I need to stay here and do that.”

Suyin frowns, and Katara knows she’s trying to think of a reason for Sokka to return to Republic City, but she won’t be able to. Suyin worships the ground Sokka walks on, and she won’t be able to say there’s someone better out there to lead the tribe. And honestly, there probably isn’t. 

“It’s not fair,” she says at length, and Katara couldn’t agree more. 

“I’m sorry,” Sokka says, reaching out again, and this time Suyin lets him tug her out of her chair and pull her into a hug. “I’ll miss you–” he says, “–all of you, so much.”

She pulls back a little. “But you’ll still come and visit, right?” 

“As much as I can,” he says, which Katara knows won’t be that often. Sokka will be busy trying to keep the tribe together, and the journey to and from Republic City is long. 

Suyin seems to understand this, too. “Or we’ll come visit you?”

“You’ll have to ask your mother about that,” he says, and Suyin’s shoulders slump. She knows if she can’t earthbend here, her mother can’t see. 

But there’s another reason Toph will never visit Sokka, Katara thinks as her gaze wanders across the room to Toph, sitting in an alcove with Zuko, Izumi, and baby Iroh, trying not-so-subtly to take advantage of the firebenders’ body heat. In the end, the unavoidable fact is that Sokka’s abandoning her, and even though she saw it coming, Katara wouldn’t be surprised if the resentment kept her from visiting the South Pole ever again. 

“Well, _I’ll_ come and visit you,” Suyin says, drawing her head up. “I don’t care what Mom says.” 

Sokka chuckles, albeit sadly, and ruffles her hair again. “Alright, but you’ve got to promise me not to give your mom too much trouble, okay?”

Another beleaguered sigh. “Okaaaay.” 

“Hey, you promise?”

Suyin clasps her hands together and bows. “I promise.”

“Good girl.” Sokka smiles and dips his head in return. “And you’ll take good care of our meteorite collection too, right?”

“Yes!” Suyin nods vigorously and pulls up her sleeve, where four thin bands of black stone hang around her wrist. She bends one away and holds it out to him. “Here’s one for you to keep, so you can remember us.” 

“Thank you.” Sokka takes the small lump of rock and cradles it delicately in the palm of his hand. “What shape do you think it should have? There’s no one to bend it down here so it’s going to be that way for a long time.” 

“Hmm…” Suyin takes the stone back and considers it for a minute, then closes her fingers around it for a second before handing it back. “It’s a little badgermole.” She smiles. “Like me, and because they were Mom’s teachers, and they only live in the Earth Kingdom.” 

From where she’s sitting Katara can tell Sokka’s trying to blink back tears. 

“Thank you,” he says again, holding it close to his chest and reaching out to stroke her hair. “I’ll carry this with me forever.” 

She hugs him again, and then Kya comes to tell them the celestial lights are visible to the east. Suyin hurries to find her coat and follow her outside, while Sokka sits back in his chair. 

“Meteorite collection, huh?” Katara says. 

“Yeah.” 

“I guess there aren’t a lot of those in the South Pole.”

“No,” he says quietly. “There aren’t.” He turns the tiny badgermole slowly in his hands, eyes trained on the fire, before tucking it into a pocket over his heart. 

Sokka says his final goodbyes at the airship terminal, and Katara lets Toph go before her, because the wind is blowing hard around them and she looks cold. She turns her eyes away, trying to give them some privacy, but she still sees him give her one final kiss, after the girls have hurried inside. His hands are tight around her waist and Toph presses up on her toes and brings her hands up to his neck, but eventually it has to end and she drops back to her heels. 

Their foreheads are pressed together, and they’re talking quietly to each other, but this time Katara can’t hear, the wind carries their voices away from her. 

It’s just as well. She isn’t sure she’d want to hear this, anyway. 

She steps forward only after Toph has disappeared inside the airship, and Sokka drags his eyes back from the doorway to look at her. 

She wastes no time in throwing her arms around him and holding on tight. “I’ll miss you,” she says, pulling him down to kiss his cheek. “Take care of yourself.” 

“I will.” He returns the kiss. “I’ll miss you, too.” 

They lean back, but Katara doesn’t let go. Her heart is pounding, and she makes a last-minute decision. “Sokka,” she says. “There’s one more thing I think you should have.”

He frowns, confused. “What is it?”

She licks her chapped lips, then reaches into a pouch at her hip and pulls out the betrothal necklace, thrown into her bag on a whim when she uncovered it while packing. 

Sokka’s eyes widen and he glances back at the airship windows, as if Toph could be watching them. “Where did you find that?”

“I… I’ve always had it,” she admits. “Since that night you… since that night.”

He doesn’t reach out to take it. “I don’t know, Katara.” 

“Please.” She holds it out again, now determined to leave it with him. “It doesn’t feel right for me to have it. It never did.”

He just shakes his head. “I can’t believe you kept it.”

“What was I supposed to do?” she says. “It’s a symbol of your love.” 

He focuses on the black stone, swinging freely on the ribbon from Katara’s fingers. “It’s a symbol of things that are over.”

“No,” she says stubbornly. “Your love isn’t over, not forever.” She refuses to believe that, not after all she’s seen between them. 

Sokka recognizes her tone and sighs, reaching out to brush the stone with his fingertips. “It doesn’t exactly bring back pleasant memories.”

She refuses to give in. “You and Toph– you had something beautiful, something _good_. And I know things are complicated and didn’t work out the way you wanted, but there must’ve been some happy memories, in between all that, otherwise you wouldn’t have made this.”

He goes quiet, thinking, and Katara holds her breath, but then he lifts the weight from her fingers and takes the stone in his hands, cradling it like Suyin’s badgermole. “You know, sometimes I wonder,” he says, “if she’d accepted, I might’ve found a way to stay.” 

Katara presses her eyes closed, the thought too painful to consider. “Sokka, just because it’s over– that doesn’t make it all bad, does it?”

“No.” He almost smiles, fingers closing over the stone. “None of it was bad.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, I couldn't fit all the angst into just one chapter- part two is coming soon! 
> 
> (also if anyone guesses the reference the title is making, you get a gold star!)


	2. Sokka, Toph, and Suyin

Katara doesn’t much like the look of the metal city. But maybe, she reflects, that’s because she’s getting old and cranky. She’s arrived late, and people are already beginning to take their seats in metal chairs set up in the town square. She barely recognizes anyone– most of the crowd seems to be the groom’s family and friends, and people Suyin met on her travels alone. She thinks she sees some sandbenders, and a group of people who look like a cross between Republic City’s metalbenders and circus acrobats. 

Eventually, she spots the back of Bumi’s spiky head sitting in the third row. Next to him, Kya turns around and gives her a wave. Katara waves back, but doesn’t come forward immediately, hanging back at the edge of the yard. There’s someone missing from this scene, and it isn’t Toph, whose grey-streaked bun is visible near the metal altar, bobbing up and down as she no doubt criticizes the workmanship of whatever bender put it together. 

Katara scans the yard again, looking for that familiar face she hasn’t seen in far too long.

“Hey, Sis.” Of course, he comes up from behind and bumps her shoulder like they’re kids. “Funny seeing you here.”

“Sokka.” She smiles too widely at his joke and turns around to give him a tight hug. 

“Aang couldn’t make it?” he says as they part, looking around at the crowd.

“No,” she says shortly, dropping her arms and pushing down the ever-present worry surrounding Aang these days. 

“Oh.” He looks concerned, and she hopes he doesn’t press the subject. “Is he–?”

“He’s fine,” she says, a bit too quickly. “Just tired. It’s been a busy couple of months. Tenzin stayed home with him.” She tries to change the subject. “Have you seen her yet?”

It works. Sokka grins and stands up straighter, resting both hands on a black-topped metal cane. “Yesterday at the rehearsal.” He leans closer, glancing around to see if anyone’s within earshot. “That’s a good-looking kid I had, Katara. I bet she’s been fighting ‘em off for years before choosing this lucky fella.” 

Katara laughs. “Remind me of his name?”

“Baatar,” he says. “Earth Kingdom architect she hired to build this place, a non-bender. Stand-up guy.”

“I’m glad you like him.” She pauses. “Has Toph met him?”

“Yeah,” he says. “She and Su patched things up a year or so ago.” He gives a fond smile. “Like she’d let her daughter marry anyone without seeing what he’s made of first.”

“That’s good!” Katara looks around. “Does that mean–?”

The smile goes away. “Lin’s not here.” He shakes his head. “Toph made Su invite her, but she never replied. Then they made me go talk to Lin myself, but that didn’t work either.” 

She crosses her arms and remembers how shifty Tenzin had been when he declined his own invitation. Now, it’s clear who’d gotten to him first. “I don’t understand that girl sometimes. This is her family.” 

Sokka shrugs uneasily. “Maybe… but you know, Toph’s family was always pretty different than ours.” 

Katara gives him a look. “Her family and our family are one and the same.”

He seems to wince and shift away from her. She wants to ask him how long he’s been using the cane, and if he can come to Air Temple Island for a few days after the ceremony for some healing sessions.

But then he speaks again, “Katara, do you think… Lin knows?” 

“Knows what?” 

“You know, _knows_.” He tilts his chin towards Toph. 

She frowns. “What does that have to do with anything?” 

Another shrug. “It’s just a sense I get sometimes …I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.”

Ten years ago, Katara would’ve rolled her eyes, but now she just releases a long sigh. “How old was she when Su was born?” 

“Six and change.” 

“So that would’ve made her a teenager when you left.” Katara shrugs. “I don’t know. It depends on how much she was paying attention.” _And whether you and Toph got better about your PDA._ But she doesn’t say that, or remind him of the fact Lin was the first one to catch them together. Or that she’s a trained detective. 

“Come on.” Katara pushes off the rail where she’s been leaning. “Bumi and Kya saved us seats.”

“Not yet.” The twinkle in his eye returns. “I mentioned I was at the rehearsal, didn’t I? I’ve got important duties to perform today.”

Katara raises her eyebrows and hope swells in her chest, but before she has the chance to ask any more questions, Sokka turns and disappears into the building behind them, moving surprisingly fast for a man with arthritis and a bad leg. 

She has half a mind to follow him, but Kya’s calling her name and the musicians are warming up, so she has to hurry to her seat before the ceremony starts. 

She doesn’t see him up close again until the reception, and even then she has to wait, because after performing the obligatory dance with Suyin, she can only watch in surprise as he crosses the ballroom to where Toph is leaning against a wall and bows, holding out his hand to ask for a dance. 

Predictably, Toph tosses her head and says something sarcastic, but he isn’t deterred. His hand drops and he leans casually on his cane, seeming to joke around with her for a few minutes until he holds out his hand again, and this time she takes it, letting him lead her onto the dance floor for an upbeat number. 

Bumi convinces her to dance this round as well, so Katara can’t watch them as closely as she might’ve wanted to, but in the glimpses she does catch Sokka is laughing, and Toph doesn’t seem to mind being swept along with his long strides, holding tight to his shoulders and failing to suppress a smile. 

Katara finally manages to catch him alone after that, while Bumi is distracted pretending to intimidate Baatar and Kya flirts with one of the bridesmaids. He’s loitering near the drinks table, watching Suyin attempt to wheedle Toph into dancing with her. 

“Did you tell her?” she says, standing close at his shoulder so she can keep her voice low. 

“No,” he says, without taking his eyes off Suyin.

_What?_ “Why not?”

“After this long?” He huffs a laugh. “She’d kill me. Not to mention what Toph would do, when she found out. Besides, this is supposed to be her special day. I still got to walk her down the aisle, didn’t I?”

“Even though you’re ‘not her real father?’” Katara says, the irony too much to ignore. 

Sokka frowns and finally turns to look at her. “You know I’ve been a father to her in everything but name.”

“Yeah.” Katara snorts. “In _everything_.” 

She fully expects a sarcastic retort, but to her surprise Sokka just lifts his chin and says haughtily, “I refuse to be baited on my baby’s wedding day.”

She can’t help it– she laughs, and the tension dissolves. He’s right, after all. They shouldn’t bicker on Suyin’s special day. She follows Sokka’s gaze to his daughter, now trying to rescue her husband from Bumi, chin resting on his shoulder and both arms wrapped around him. 

“Do you ever wish you’d told her?” she says, half to herself. 

“Mm.” Sokka makes a low, rumbling sound deep in his chest. “Sometimes. It would’ve been nice to teach her about her heritage, I suppose.” He grins. “Maybe she could’ve brought betrothal necklaces to the Earth Kingdom.” 

Her mind returns to his dance with Toph, spinning around the dance floor in a way that would’ve seemed clumsy if they were at all out of sync with each other. “Speaking of betrothal necklaces…”

“What about ‘em?”

She gently nudges his shoulder. “Whatever happened to that one you made?”

To her surprise, his face barely reacts, but he leans slightly away again and his hand tightens on his cane. “Wow, I’m not sure.”

“Come on, Sokka.”

“What? It was so long ago.” He shakes his head and tries to pull off _casual_ , which might’ve worked on anyone but her.

“If you did have it would you give it to her?”

He laughs, although it doesn’t quite touch his eyes. “Why would I do that?”

“Because you still love her.”

His smile disappears, but he still doesn’t look at her. “You said it yourself, Katara. I have to be satisfied with what she’s willing to give.”

“But you still have the necklace, don’t you?” She doesn’t know why she cares this much– what she expected to happen when she gave it back to him at the South Pole. Perhaps the romance of the occasion is getting to her. 

Sokka takes a breath and looks like he’s about to answer, but then they’re interrupted and he lets it out with a wide smile instead. “Hey, Toph, great party, isn’t it?”

“So people keep telling me,” she says, taking a long sip of her drink. “I suppose I can’t complain… although the true test will be if all these buildings this _architect_ has constructed are still standing in twenty years.”

Sokka laughs. “D’you think any of us will be around to see that?”

“Not if we’ve got any luck,” Toph shoots him a wicked grin, and Katara has to press her lips together to keep from chuckling at their morbid humor. It would never do to encourage them. 

“Oh stop it, you two.” The music picks up again and she gestures to Suyin, chin tucked snugly against Baatar’s shoulder and smiling at nothing in particular. “Look at them, I’m sure they’ll be very happy.”

“Oh, I’m sure they will be,” Sokka says. “In any case, they seem to have a lot of friends.” He glances around the crowd, and Katara gets the sense that he recognizes about as many people as she does. 

“She must’ve been busy since she left Republic City,” Katara says, which comes dangerously close to mentioning The Incident, but Toph doesn’t comment on it. 

Sokka grins. “She needed to get away. See the world, like we did.” 

“Speak for yourself,” Toph says, sipping her drink. “I don’t recall seeing anything.” 

“Come on, Toph.” He ignores her joke, nudging her shoulder. “What’ve you been doing since leaving the force? I heard you told Aang you were ‘looking for enlightenment.’”

Katara laughs without thinking. “Really?”

“I’d just been feeling like I needed a change,” Toph says coolly. “I had a lot to think about.”

Now the conversation really is drifting toward dangerous waters, so Katara tries to steer them away. “Any idea what she did for those few years?” she says to no one in particular. “Besides making friends with sandbenders, of course.”

“She told me she spent some time on Ember Island,” Toph says. “Worked backstage for the Ember Island Players, and performed as a backup dancer in some of their musicals.”

Sokka nods. “She wrote to me a few times while she was there. I took a week off once and saw some of her performances.”

Toph frowns. “She wrote to you?”

He looks a little uncomfortable, fiddling with the handle of his cane. “Well, the first time was pretty soon after… all of it went down. She wrote to me from Gaoling after a few months with Lao and Poppy and I sort of… invited her to visit me at the South Pole.”

“And what did you do during this visit?” 

“Nothing much,” Sokka says lightly. “Just talked, and I let her unload all her feelings about… everything.” 

Katara finds herself tensing again, and silently curses all this _drama_. Why does every conversation about the Beifongs have to be loaded and strained?

But Toph doesn’t say anything, or appear to react in any way, so Sokka continues, “She was pretty upset about it, especially since she promised me she’d be good at Dad’s funeral.” 

Toph huffs a dry laugh. “Some promise.”

He ignores her. “But mostly we just spent some quality time together. I even took her ice dodging.”

“Really?” Katara claps her hands together, happy that Su at least got a taste of her Water Tribe heritage. 

“Yep.” Sokka grins proudly. “She received the Mark of the Brave.”

“And then she went to Ember Island?” Toph asks. 

“I’m not sure.” Sokka shrugs. “After a few months with me, she still seemed restless, so I told her to do some traveling. I don’t know where she went first, but she seemed to get around, and that’s how she met Baatar. So really–” he smirks and gestures to the bride and groom in the middle of the dance floor, “this is all my doing.”

Katara rolls her eyes. “Sure it is.” 

“Well, I’m just saying it wouldn’t’ve happened without me.”

Toph lands a punch on his bicep. “Thanks, Snoozles.”

He groans dramatically, clutching his arm. “Careful, Beifong. I’m an old man, you know.”

“So I’ve noticed.” Toph clicks her tongue and reaches for Sokka’s cane. 

He lets her take it, although Katara notices him lean against the wall and shift his weight to his right leg. 

Toph turns it over in her hands, running her palms around its length. “Did Su make this for you?”

“She did.” Sokka takes it back. “I re-broke my leg the year before she saw me and noticed me limping.” 

“She topped it with meteorite,” Toph says. 

Katara swallows, glancing down to the black stone beneath Sokka’s hand. She’d noticed it too, and wonders if Toph is thinking the same thing she is. 

“What can I say?” Sokka shrugs. “An appreciation for space earth runs in the family.”

Toph looks like she’s about to say something else, but is interrupted by Suyin and Baatar calling from the other side of the ballroom, preparing to pose for a picture. She departs, grumbling about stupid pictures not being nearly as good for creating memories as statues. 

Katara’s almost grateful, because it means she can ask the question that’s been on her mind since she first saw the black stone on top of the cane. “Sokka, is that meteorite from the necklace?”

His crooked fingers still from worrying the end of it, and he stares across the room to where Toph is posing with the bride and groom. Suyin is beautiful– black curls falling artfully over her face and looking radiantly happy, tucked under Baatar’s arm with one hand on his chest. 

But Katara knows Sokka’s looking at Toph– standing tall to Suyin’s right and gracing the photographer with a hint of a smile. Her mouth and eyes are lined, and her hair a little thinner, but Katara thinks she’s aged the best out of all of them. 

“No,” Sokka says. “She used the badgermole she gave me after Dad’s funeral.”

Katara nods. “You said you got hurt a year before she came to see you?”

“Something like that.”

“And you still use it?”

“None of the healers back home are as good as you, Baby Sister.”

Hearing him call her _baby sister_ makes her eyes grow wet. An old, childish nickname when their childhood is so far behind them. Aang would say something poetic about all things coming to an end eventually, but selfishly (childishly), she doesn’t feel ready for anything to end. 

Sokka looks back at Toph, with the intensity in his eyes mirrored when Suyin looks at Baatar. Katara hopes Toph is wrong about her prediction for twenty years from now. So many things still feel unfinished. 

* * *

For weeks after his death, Katara haunts his house at the Southern Water Tribe capital in a state that she can only describe as disbelief. How is this possible? Barely five years after Aang left her, now Sokka’s gone too? Did she do something in a past life to deserve this? A lifetime spent becoming a master waterbender and a healer, and she’s unable to save her husband and now her brother. 

Kya’s here of course, and after the funeral, she takes over Korra’s training while Katara tries to find the will to sort through some of Sokka’s things. But after almost a month all she can do is sit there, in a chair by the bed where he died and stare at the doorway, holding the crazy hope in her mind that it’s all been a dream and he’s going to walk into the room again, healthy and joking and teasing her for revealing how much she really cared. 

But he won’t, and her rational mind knows this. There had been a full moon the night he died, and she felt the blood stop flowing herself. She hopes Aang is happy to see him again, and is almost jealous she doesn’t get to see him, too. 

To push away such thoughts, she closes her eyes and pictures Korra, five years old last month and already flourishing as a waterbender. 

_Aang is still with me_ , she remembers. _I need to be here for her_. 

But Sokka is not, and for weeks the world has felt unbearably empty without him. 

The bedroom looks out towards the water, faint shapes of sentries standing guard on watchtowers. At this hour, the road is empty, an almost blinding white in the late afternoon light. 

It’s so bright, Katara doesn’t see them at first– two figures in the distance, walking towards her from the gate. She squints, thinking they look vaguely familiar, then gasps when they draw closer and she sees that smaller one is Toph, hunched and shuffling blindly across the ice with her feet encased in thick boots, and the taller one is Suyin, one hand holding her mother’s elbow.

Katara can’t believe it at first– Toph is difficult to contact at the best of times, but Katara had reached out to both Lin and Suyin after the attack, and Zuko said he would try to find her in person. After almost two weeks with no news, Katara had allowed the funeral to be held without her, giving up hope she’d make the journey south even if she’d heard. 

Su must remember where Sokka lived, because she leads them right to the house and they hover in the front hall like they’re ghosts themselves. 

Katara musters a weak smile as she invites them inside and leads them to the bedroom, the only place she’s bothered to light a fire. They haven’t seen each other in years, but she hears enough from Zaofu to know the latest news. “It’s so good to see you, Su,” she says softly. “Congratulations on the newest additions to your family.”

Suyin blushes and smiles back. “They were two years old last month.”

“Sorry,” Katara murmurs, retreating to her usual place by the bed. “Sometimes I forget how much time has passed.”

“It’s alright.” Suyin leads Toph, who still hasn’t spoken, to the only other chair in the room and flutters awkwardly between them. “I’m sorry we missed the funeral.”

Katara’s eyes grow wet again. “I didn’t know you were coming,” she says. “If I’d known, I would’ve told them to delay.”

Suyin shakes her head. “We didn’t plan it, and I didn’t think to radio ahead.” She fiddles with the fur cuffs of her coat. “I was away from Zaofu when your letter arrived, and then I had to wait for Mom…” She glances behind her at Toph. “We came as soon as we heard.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re here now.” Katara tries to direct this at Toph as well, still sitting hunched in her chair, face unreadable.

“Me, too.” Suyin says. “I– we would love to help you and Kya in any way we can. Anything you need.” 

“Thank you,” Katara says, although she’s not sure either of them can give her what she really needs– which is a very long rest, and a break from the grief that’s weighed heavily in her chest since Aang died. 

Suyin dithers for a second, standing awkwardly in the center of the room, and Katara reflects that she never could sit still. “I noticed some things left in the living room that looked like Uncle Sokka’s too…”

Katara presses her lips together as her eyes tear up. _Uncle Sokka_. All this time, and Su still calls him _uncle_. 

“I’m sorry.” Suyin misinterprets her tears and steps back, bowing her head. “It’s not my place.” 

“No, no, it’s alright.” Katara waves her hand and levers herself up from her chair. 

Suyin relaxes at the chance to do _something_ , and eagerly follows Katara to the sitting room, leaving Toph on her chair in the bedroom. 

Katara shows her a jumble of items piled near the front door, where Tonraq and Senna had unloaded a sled packed with things collected from Sokka’s council chambers. “These were all his.” 

“Would it help if we moved them into his room?” Suyin says. “So you can go through everything there?”

“Oh I didn’t think I should bother,” she says. “It’s all going to be redistributed anyway among his… his family.” She falters, bitterness burning in her stomach again at the things that should’ve been left for Su.

Again, Suyin misinterprets her hesitation. “You know, he was like family to us, too. Me and Mom and Lin. I still remember the time we had all together, when I was really little.” 

“I’m glad.” Katara thinks she might cry, at the memory of the way Sokka smiled whenever he talked about those years. “He was so happy with you.”

Suyin shrugs. “But now I understand why he came back here. I could never leave Zaofu forever, and not just because of Baatar and the kids. The Metal Clan is my home. Not just the place, but the people. I have a duty to lead them, to protect them. It feels like more than family– they’re like a tribe of my own.” 

Katara thinks the lump in her throat will burst if she so much as opens her mouth, and she’ll break every promise she ever made to Toph and Sokka and tell Suyin everything. Because she _has_ to know where this desire for a clan, a tribe, comes from. She has to know that she’s Sokka’s only child, and by all rights everything in this house belongs to _her._

Suyin continues, “That’s partly why I convinced Mom to come here,” she said, worrying her fingers together. “I’m afraid she’s becoming more… isolated. You know how she is, thinking she only needs herself and nobody else. She still won’t stay in one place, wandering all over the Earth Kingdom alone as if to prove her independence. I’ve asked her over and over to stay in Zaofu permanently– with me and Baatar, and her grandchildren.”

Katara nods, throat working as she finds her voice again. “Yes, that would be a good arrangement.”

“But so far she’s refused,” Suyin says, letting out a tired sigh and running her hands over a fishing rod leaning against the wall. “And when I heard about what happened to Uncle Sokka, I just couldn’t let her try to deal with it all by herself. I know how much she cared for him, and I know she hates the South Pole, but I thought that maybe coming here would help her remember her… her family.” 

She gestures faintly at Katara, uncertainty creeping into her eyes, so Katara takes her hand, holding it tight. 

“We are her family,” she says. “And I’m glad you brought her here. It’s what he would’ve wanted.”

Suyin gives a small half-smile, and Katara stares hard at her face, trying to memorize the crook of her mouth, the slope of her cheekbones that look so much like Sokka’s. 

“Tell you what,” she says. “Maybe there’s something I can say to Toph that will… help her understand.” 

The smile grows. “That would be wonderful.” 

Somewhat invigorated, Katara turns her attention to the largest trunk, moved from its usual place in the study. “Now if you’ll help me get this into his room, perhaps Toph and I can sort through it together.”

“Yes!” Suyin understands immediately and grips the side of the trunk, sliding it onto a sheet of ice Katara bends over the wooden floor. “I’ll give you some time to go through it alone– maybe try to see Kya.” 

“I’m sure she would enjoy that,” Katara says, drawing the ice out on the floor so Suyin can push the trunk through the halls. “Korra will be back with her parents by now, so Kya will be free for the evening.” 

“Perfect,” Suyin says as they reach the bedroom. She brushes her hands on her coat and turns back to Toph. “Mom, I’m going to visit Kya and let you and Katara catch up. But I’ll be back this evening, okay?” 

“Okay.” It’s the first word Toph’s spoken since arriving at the house, her voice cracked and weathered but no less steady. 

“See you then.” Katara nods her goodbyes, but Toph is silent again as Suyin departs. 

Katara’s promise is fresh in her mind, but so is Suyin’s face, a pale reflection of Sokka’s. Staring at Toph’s stony expression, Katara feels the bitter anger rise in her stomach, and can’t find it in herself to push it away.

She blinks, and tears are running down her cheeks. “How could you?” she whispers as soon as the front door closes. “All these years, and she still calls him her uncle.” Her hands are shaking, and she clutches the folds of her dress. “He never got to say in public she was his daughter.”

Toph is silent, doesn’t defend herself, just sits there as still as one of her statues, milky eyes staring over Katara’s shoulder. 

“Tonraq is taking over the Council of Elders, Toph!” she says. 

Finally, Toph speaks. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“He’s from the North!” She’s sobbing now, and projecting her pain, but she doesn’t care. “And I don’t care if he was banished, his brother is still chief up there and I can’t believe he won’t let them tax us into bankruptcy.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Toph snaps.

“It isn’t ridiculous!” Katara says. “Suyin is _Sokka’s_. She should’ve been his heir.”

“Enough!” Toph unfreezes and stands, pointing a crooked finger at her. “That makes me _glad_ I never said anything to her. She doesn’t deserve to have her fate dictated by her parents– me _or_ Sokka. She got to choose her own path. She was _lucky_ not to know.”

“You’re wrong.” Katara stands as well, with more energy than she’s felt in weeks. “You denied her a father, Toph. And even if you tell her tomorrow, he’s dead and she’ll never get to see him knowing who he truly was.” 

“He _was_ a father to her,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what she called him.”

“Yes it does,” Katara insists, gripping the bed and sinking painfully to her knees in front of the trunk. “She deserved to know. She deserved to know while he was _alive_.” 

“What’s done is done,” Toph says. “It was for the best.”

“You know that’s a lie,” Katara says. “You’re lying.”

“You’re being irrational.” Toph walks to the other side of the room, one hand trailing on the wall. 

Katara unclasps the latch on the trunk and opens it, the anger and bitterness spurring her to start what she’s failed to begin after so many weeks. “Then I’m not the only one.”

Toph reaches the doorway and Katara thinks she’s going to leave, feel her way back to the street and find someone to guide her back to the council building, but she doesn’t. She lingers near the doorway and cocks her head, listening as Katara unpacks the trunk. On the surface, she pulls out mostly clothes, plus some blankets, and cheap trinkets purchased here and there because Sokka could never resist a bargain. 

“Why did you even come?” Katara mutters, because it feels strange to do this in silence when there’s someone else here.

“Suyin thought I should.”

“Good instincts, that one.” Katara’s lip curls. “I wonder where she gets them.” She’s beginning to find more personal things. Stacks of creased and faded letters bound with string– from her and Aang, from Zuko and Mai, from Lin, from Suyin. One of Suki’s fans. A teacup from the Jasmine Dragon. But she isn’t sorting anything, not really, just pulling everything out and laying it on the floor around her, out in the open and exposed. 

“I didn’t come here to be berated.” 

“Then what do you expect me to do!” Katara bursts out. 

Toph looks pained. “He wouldn’t want us to fight.”

Katara’s chest tightens. “Don’t you dare,” she says, “tell me what Sokka would have wanted. He _wanted_ to marry you. He _wanted_ to call Suyin his daughter. You don’t get to say what he wants, not anymore.”

“I never– that’s not–” Toph’s façade is cracking, and Katara feels a faint, familiar thrill of victory. 

“Admit it,” she says. “You were selfish. And afraid. You kept him at arm’s length because you were afraid he didn’t love you like you loved him.”

“He didn’t,” Toph whispers. “He couldn’t.”

“He _did_ ,” Katara says. “He’s my brother– I know.” She’s reached the bottom of the trunk, the last of Sokka’s most precious belongings. Things that belonged to their father, their grandmother, and even some from their mother. The pouch that holds his White Lotus tile from Piandao. A sloppy drawing of Appa. An old green shoulder bag from the Earth Kingdom, rolled up and pressed into a corner. 

“And you should’ve known it, too,” she says, reaching for the bag with shaking hands. Sure enough, she can hear things clink together when she picks it up, and reaches in to pull out a handful of thin metal sheets, still loosely curled from time spent in a hawk’s canister and etched with characters in Toph’s shaky, unpracticed hand. 

But under all those, she can see a familiar green ribbon. 

She knows Toph can feel them– the few pieces of metal or earth in a collection mostly fabric, wood, and bone– so she doesn’t say anything as she takes out the necklace and cradles it in her hand. 

“Why else would he have offered you this,” she says, staring at the intricate design and imagining Sokka’s hands, young and alive and _strong_ , carving shapes into the meteorite. “If he didn’t love you with everything he had.”

Toph’s face is blank, but she takes a few steps forward. “I can’t believe he kept that.”

“He didn’t, at first,” Katara says. “He wanted to throw it into the ocean when you turned him down, but I saved it. I gave it back when he left Republic City.”

Toph’s expression turns hard. “You had no right.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You should’ve let him throw it away.”

Katara shakes her head, leaning back against the empty trunk. She’s so tired. She thinks she could fall asleep any minute, and maybe never wake up. “Why did you come here, Toph?” 

Slowly, the anger seems to melt away, until she sinks to the floor as well, with far more grace than she should have at her age, and picks up one of the metal scrolls. “I thought he was still alive.”

“You what?”

“Before Suyin told me,” she says, setting down the scroll and picking up the one next to it, “I heard he had survived the attack.”

“He did,” Katara says. “At first.” 

Toph hangs her head. She puts the second scroll aside and folds her hands in her lap, hunching forward. “I thought I had more time. I thought I could say goodbye.”

“Toph…” Katara wants to take her hand, but Toph is sitting too far away for her to reach.

“Turns out I was too late,” she says. “Again.”

“I’m sorry.” Katara starts to cry again, softly this time. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.”

“If you couldn’t do it, no one could.” Toph shifts closer, so Katara’s hand lands on hers, but then flinches away. “I know you must hate me, Katara.”

“No!” She reaches for her hand again. “Toph, of course I could never hate you.” 

“I would understand. I made you choose between me and Sokka– so many times– then got mad when you chose him.”

Katara closes her eyes and sees Sokka, walking up the stairs on Air Temple Island to pick up Lin, an airy smile on his face as he carries her on his shoulders home to Toph. At the airship terminal where he kissed her one last time. Dancing in her arms at Suyin’s wedding. “I just wanted him to be happy, Toph. And he was happiest when he was with you.”

“You don’t have to say that.” Toph’s close to crying too, but she doesn’t pull her hand away. 

“It’s true,” Katara says, shifting her grip so Toph can feel her pulse. “If the floor was stone you could tell.” 

Tears finally spill over Toph’s cheeks. “He’d be so disappointed in me.”

“What?”

“I messed everything up,” she says. “With Lin and Su. It all went wrong, when he went away. And now it’s probably ruined for good.”

“But you made up with Su,” Katara says, holding tighter to Toph’s hands. “You saw her married, you’ve met your grandchildren.” 

“I haven’t spoken to Lin in five years.”

“You what?” Katara can’t imagine going one month without speaking to one of her children. Even Tenzin, throwing himself into Republic City politics and bitter over his crumbling relationship with Lin manages to write on a regular basis, and even makes the occasional journey down on his air bison. 

“A few months after Aang’s funeral,” Toph says. “That was the last time I tried… the last time I tried to do anything.”

“And what happened?” Katara says, although she can already guess it’s nothing good. 

“The same thing that always happens,” Toph says bitterly. “She wants to talk about her father.” 

“Why don’t you just tell her?” Katara says gently, reaching for her shoulder. 

“What good would it do?” Toph bats the hand away. “I can’t lie to her, and she doesn’t want to hear the truth. Kanto never knew I was pregnant, and I never tried to find him and tell him about her. I didn’t love him, I wasn’t interested in raising a child with him, and therefore uninterested in giving her a father.” Her jaw tightens. “I thought I would be enough for her. I tried to be enough.”

“It’s natural for a child to be curious about their parents,” Katara says.

“She isn’t a child anymore,” Toph says sharply. “But that isn’t really why she’s so desperate to know.”

“Then why?” Katara says, although she has a feeling she already knows. 

“Suyin!” Toph says. “It always comes back to Suyin. She’s accused me of playing favorites their entire lives, and she thinks that the reason for that is their fathers.”

“But that’s not true, is it?” 

“I– I don’t know.” Toph looks uncertain, worrying her hands in her lap. “I never thought so but what if– what if it was unconscious? What if I was always easier on Suyin because she was Sokka’s?” Her voice cracks again on his name. “I failed as a mother, and I let him down. I’ve let everyone down.”

“Toph…”

“Do you think it was inevitable?”

“What?”

“I didn’t get along with my parents, so I could never get along with my kids. Maybe I was always meant to fuck it up.”

“Okay, okay.” Katara raises a hand to stop her. “You were never _meant_ to do anything, Toph. This is just the way things are. And you _can_ still fix it.”

“Not if Lin won’t even talk to me, or to Su.” 

“You just have to give her time.”

“She’s had five years. If she’s decided to completely cut us out of her life, I guess I’ll just have to live with that.”

“You never know,” Katara says quietly. “She could come around someday.”

“Sure, when pig-deer fly.”

Katara’s fingers ache, and she uncurls them from around the necklace. She remembers her promise to Suyin. “Is that why you can’t settle down in Zaofu?” she says. “Because of what Lin would think?”

Toph shakes her head, face pinched and ashamed. “I don’t want to ruin that, too.”

“What do you mean?” 

“Suyin built her perfect family there,” she says. “With her husband, her kids, her dancers, her _clan_. I know it’s everything she’s always wanted, and something I could never give her.”

“But you _are_ a part of her family,” Katara says. “And she wants you to be with her.”

Toph gently pulls her hand away. “I have no place there, and she would realize that if I stuck around for more than a few months. Besides,” her face turns thoughtful, “I’m still looking for enlightenment.” 

Katara frowns, unable to tell whether she’s serious. 

“Don’t give me that look, Sugar Queen, I know what you’re thinking.” 

_What look?_ How does she always _know_? 

“But trust me when I say I’m close to finding it.” 

Again, Katara has no idea what she means, or how serious she is, but relents with a sigh and (to her surprise) a soft laugh. “Alright, Toph. I trust you.” 

For the first time, Toph gives a shadow of her old wolf-like grin, although it doesn’t quite reach her eyes like it did when she would joke around with Sokka. 

“Let me know, will you?” Katara says. “When you find it, I mean.”

“Sure thing.” 

“And– you should take this with you.” On impulse, she holds out the betrothal necklace, the black stone swinging freely between them. “For good luck.” Katara can see an objection form on Toph’s lips– something about the necklace clearly being the exact opposite of good luck, but she keeps going, “And because he would’ve wanted you to have it.” She almost laughs. “He always wanted you to have it.” 

Toph doesn’t move for a long moment, so long Katara almost thinks she’s badly miscalculated, but then she reaches out and grips the stone with her weathered fingers. It stops swinging, and Katara lets the ribbon go, so the stone comes to rest in Toph’s calloused palm. 

Katara braces herself, a part of her still waiting for the rejection, but it doesn’t come. “He loved you,” she says softly, when she can breathe again. “And I… I hope this will help you remember that. He loved you no matter what.”

Toph’s eyes are wet again, her thumb sliding over the design Sokka carved into the meteorite so long ago. “Thank you, Katara,” is all she says. “I think it will.” 

That night, after Toph has gone to sleep, Katara apologizes to Suyin for not convincing her to stay in Zaofu. 

“It’s alright.” Suyin looks disappointed, but not surprised. “I worry, but I suppose I’ll have to trust her when she says she’s happy on her own. I’ll try to be satisfied with visits for now.” 

“I’m sure it won’t be forever,” Katara says. “Just like I’m sure that someday Lin will come around.”

Suyin grants her a sad smile. “Sokka always said you were an optimist.” 

Katara huffs a laugh and shakes her head. “And he always said optimists were liars.”

Suyin laughs too, although she has to brush away tears that spring to her eyes. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re a liar, Katara.” 

Katara’s heart swells and she pulls her niece into a tight embrace. Suyin tucks her chin into Katara’s shoulder and releases a few choked, quiet sobs. Katara holds her and strokes her back, closing her eyes against the guilt that builds in her chest at the thought that the biggest lie she’s ever told is the one she’s told to Suyin all her life. 

_I hope you get to know eventually,_ she thinks, so hard she almost believes Suyin can feel it. _I hope a part of you already knows_. 

When Toph and Suyin return to the Earth Kingdom, Katara waits for a letter, or a radio. From Suyin, Baatar, or even Lin, telling the long and exhaustive tale of their reconciliation and all their secrets finally uncovered. 

But it doesn’t come. All she receives is a short note from Suyin, a few months after their visit, mentioning that Toph has disappeared again, and no one has been able to find her. The tone of the letter is casual, clearly trying to hide her concern, but Katara feels strangely calm. 

Whatever Toph was looking for, Katara hopes that she found it. 

* * *

After barely three hours in the swamp, Lin bends her armor away from her body and pulls the hair off her neck with a string, of half a mind to just cut it all off. “Spirits, do you think Mom retired to a swamp just to punish us?” 

Suyin doesn’t quite roll her eyes, but Lin can tell she’s tempted. “Very funny, Lin.”

“I’m serious, she’s probably looking down at us right now and laughing.” She makes a face at the slime coating her boots as they pick their way over patches of mud and puddles to the front door. Their mother’s hut looks the same as it did the last time Lin was here, almost three years ago now, when she and Suyin took Toph to the Fire Nation for Zuko’s funeral. 

“Oh, shut up.” Suyin bends away some of the mud and moss caked on the hut’s low roof, as if their mother ever cared about the way things looked. “She was a good mom. She always did her best.”

Lin still finds that debatable, but recently she’s been trying to concede a few points. “I guess we weren’t the easiest children.”

Suyin raises a playful eyebrow as she opens the door and ducks inside. “Speak for yourself, I was a perfect angel.”

Lin gives an inelegant snort that would’ve made their mother proud and follows her sister inside. The heat is nearly unbearable and she strips down to her tank top, using her shirt to swat at the flies buzzing around her head. The interior also looks exactly the same as it did three years ago, albeit dustier, if that’s even possible. There’s still sheets on the low bed tucked into the corner, and their mother’s few worldly belongings are arranged in messy piles on various pieces of worn furniture. 

“She didn’t want to take any of this with her?” Lin says, looking around at the mess. 

“No.” Suyin shakes her head, lips pressed together. Being closer, she’d gotten there first when they’d received word of their mother’s failing health, and Lin had met them at Zaofu. “She… she thought she’d be coming back. I didn’t want to argue.” 

Lin nods. “Probably would’ve been a waste of time.” She pulls open the nearest drawer, only to upset the delicately balanced pile of knickknacks on top of the dresser, sending them all clattering to the floor. With a sigh, she kneels down to collect them, one by one to see if any of them are worth sending to Katara. She finds a few old hairbands, a couple misshapen chunks of meteorite, and a slightly tarnished metal scroll she recognizes as Opal’s wedding invitation. 

She holds up the last thing for Suyin to see. “Can you believe she kept this?”

Suyin’s lips twitch up. “I’m beginning to think she kept everything.” She holds up something uncovered in her own pile of stuff, a figurine of several sheets of metal twisted into the vague formation of a fire lily. “Huan must’ve made this when he was ten years old.”

Lin bends it out of Suyin’s hands and holds it up to the light. “I dare you to bring this to his gallery opening in Ba Sing Se.”

She grins. “Spirits, he’d never speak to me again.”

Lin shrugs and tosses it back. “I could give him some tips.”

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you?” Suyin pitches it back, hard enough that Lin steps backwards to catch it. 

“Best thirty years of my life.” She returns the metal fire lily just as hard.

Suyin laughs, catching the trinket with a mischievous glint in her eye. 

Soon the game of catch becomes more like a sparring match as they start using bending to make it move in more and more unpredictable arcs. Suyin stumbles upon the pieces of meteorite and Lin a few metal buttons, until the small room is filled with small metal objects flying this way and that, both grown women ducking and weaving among them and giggling like children. 

Lin almost forgets the reason they’re here until she trips over the stone bed frame and remembers all over again that her mother is dead, and that they aren’t supposed to be laughing yet. 

But she can’t seem to stop, and uses her free hand to brush away the moisture rising suddenly in her eyes. 

Suyin is doing the same, and it’s only a matter of time before one of them loses focus and a chunk of meteorite punches a hole in the ceiling, surprising both of them into dropping the rest of the projectiles. A mess before, the room is now in utter chaos. 

Suyin sits heavily on the bed, still laughing and crying simultaneously. “We’ve just completely trashed our late mother’s home.” 

“She wouldn’t have had it any other way.” Lin takes a few deep breaths and tries to regain control, her emotions as jumbled and disorganized as the house. She clumsily bends a chair from the packed dirt floor, sending yet another stack of boxes toppling over. The one on top breaks open on impact, its contents falling into the circle of light created by the new hole in the ceiling. 

Suyin doesn’t see, still wiping her eyes and fixing the bindings on her forearms, but Lin’s heart pounds as she realizes what it is. She reaches down and grasps the green ribbon, threadbare and faded with age, holding the stone up to the light. 

“What is that?” Suyin leans closer, and gasps when it dawns on her. “I didn’t know he made one of those for her.” 

“I didn’t know she kept it.” Lin’s voice is strained, her throat choked up for a reason she can’t quite place. Her stomach burns with curiosity, and she wants to march into the swamp and refuse to leave until the fog shows her a vision of her mother so she can ask all the questions crowding the front of her mind. _When did he make this for you? Why didn’t you tell us?_

“She must’ve turned him down,” Suyin says.

“Spirits only know why.” Lin runs her thumb around the grooves in the stone, shallow after years of repeated stroking. Even after all this time, her childhood is still dominated with memories of Uncle Sokka– picking her up from school on the days her mother worked late, visits to the zoo on weekends, mock battles in their backyard where he’d “die” in the most dramatic way possible in order to make her laugh. 

Toph always kissed him when she came home from work, and he’d sneak an arm around her waist and press his lips to her neck when he thought Lin wasn’t looking. She caught them relaxing once, late one night soon after Suyin was born, Toph’s head on his lap and hands threaded through her hair. Lin remembers it clearly because her mother’s feet were off the floor, grimy heels propped up on pillows, and yet she looked completely calm, breathing even and deep, almost like she was asleep. But then her hand came up to cup Sokka’s face and he leaned down to kiss her, slowly, gently, whispering something tender in her ear. 

Even at seven, Lin had known to be embarrassed and quickly turned away, hurrying back to her room and trying to understand what she’d seen. It only dawned on her gradually– the realization of who Sokka truly was to Toph, and who she was to him. 

“She loved him,” she says, feeling certain of that, at least. 

“Well, he must’ve really loved her, too.” Suyin stands and walks forward, and Lin allows her to take the necklace and inspect it for herself. “This is beautiful. It would’ve taken days to carve by hand.”

“He always liked those meteorites.” Lin vaguely remembers that her mother’s precious meteorite bracelet was still on her arm when they’d buried her, and that it had been a gift from Sokka. 

“Yeah, I remember.”

Lin manages a half-grin. “Must be where you get it.” She takes the necklace back, holding it up to the light. “You know, you _were_ a pretty good kid until Uncle Sokka left.”

“Yeah, right.” Suyin drops her eyes to the floor, carefully avoiding the right side of Lin’s face. 

“You couldn’t see it, but I did,” Lin says. “You started acting out soon after he left. Trying to figure out who you were without him to guide you.”

“Really?”

Lin holds the necklace out again. “You should keep it.”

“What? No, this was so important to her–”

“She would’ve wanted you to have it.”

Suyin’s shoulders relax and she takes it, turning it over in her hands. “You know, I never thought it was fair that Mom told you your father’s name, but she never told me mine.”

Lin hesitates. She wonders if Suyin knows, even subconsciously. “I think… she felt a little bad, because she didn’t love my father.”

Suyin tilts her head. “Do you think she loved mine?”

Lin stares at the little carved meteorite, cradled gently in Suyin’s palm, like one of the stones from her collection. Faintly, she remembers telling Katara once when she was very little that she wished Uncle Sokka was her dad. She can admit to herself, several decades too late, that perhaps she was always a little jealous of Su for having the real father she always wanted. 

She finds herself suppressing a rueful smile. What would Sokka have said to that? _Don’t be ridiculous, Lin. Of course I can be your real father, too._

“Yeah,” Lin says, as Suyin’s eyes grow wide in understanding. “I know she did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Picture a wave, in the ocean. You can see it, measure it– its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there. You can see it, you know what it is, it’s a wave. 
> 
> And then it crashes in the shore and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. That’s one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean– where it came from, and where it’s supposed to be. 
> 
> \- [The Good Place S04E13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1IchzbtNj0)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was also partially inspired by [this angsty headcanon](https://cats-and-metersticks.tumblr.com/post/620133413147508736/madamebomb-headcanon-the-reason-toph-is-so)
> 
> Playlist  
> "Run to You" - Ocie Elliot  
> "Beggar's Prayer" - Emiliana Torrini
> 
> I'd like to thank all my Tokka friends for listening to me rant about and tease this fic for _months_ and offering endless support and encouragement <33 I love you all so much! 
> 
> As always I'm on tumblr at [cats-and-metersticks](https://cats-and-metersticks.tumblr.com/)


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